Maxis: Your Reward For Buying Our Horribly Launched SimCity Is The Previous, Better Version Of It

from the one-step-forward,-one-version-back dept

Many of us are still waiting for a Maxis mea culpa following the horrible release of their always-online SimCity game. When last we checked in with Maxis, they were busy pretending that all of the backlash surrounding this complete mess of a release didn't exist and that tons (tons!) of people just loved all the features in the game that didn't work. Well, they're back to blogging again, and while it is only an apology in the barest sense of the word, they are offering up some freebies for their throngs of pissed off fans.

Our SimCity Mayors are incredibly important to the team at Maxis. We sincerely apologize for the difficulties at launch and hope to make it up to you with a free PC game download from Origin.

This, of course, falls short of the full apology they should be making, which would be to say that lying their faces off about why the game always needed to be online (since it didn't) was wrong, as was their presumption that their fans needed to be treated like criminals. But, hey, baby steps, I guess. So what games are you offering up for free?

...Really? As an apology for selling a game with an always-online requirement for a city building simulation, which we now know doesn't actually need to be online at all, you're offering up the previous version of the game which didn't have that requirement? And, based on what I can see from the general reviews, received far superior reviews? Why bother releasing the new SimCity at all, if the result is pointing people to the last iteration, a better overall product? Have we gotten to the point where you guys are just trying to make us laugh?

Reader Comments

Gamers: "But we already either have all these games or don't want to play what you have offered. Especially that last version of SimCity."
EA: "Nonsense. Nobody could possibly have that many legitimate games. You must be a pirate."
Gamers: "We refuse to accept that we legally paid money just so we could get a crappy game and another game that we already legally purchased!"
out_of_the_lube: "MASNICK! LOOPY! PIRATES RARGHBLE FLARG!"

Hah! Inception. On Sim City 6 they'll offer Sim City 5 as apologies to some screw up that will offer Sim City 4 because in their view Sim City 5 won't be fixed even though it's easily fixable so it'll still offer Sim City 4 to compensate. Since Sim City 4 was the last edition done right that's the deepest level you'll get without piracy Mr Customer.

Laughter is the best medicine.

"Have we gotten to the point where you guys are just trying to make us laugh?"

Yes.

The last line on their blog:

"USERS WHO ARE BENEATH THE MINIMUM AGE REQUIRED TO ACCESS INTERACTIVE ONLINE SERVICES WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE GRANTED A COPY OF SIMCITY 4: DELUXE EDITION AND BEJEWELED 3 INSTEAD. THESE GAMES WILL BE ADDED DIRECTLY TO YOUR MY GAMES LIBRARY OVER THE COMING DAYS."

So if you are kid who is too young to play online you get 2 free games instead of one.

Give us classic SimCity for the Macintosh and MS-DOS and Windows and stop posting take-down notices for those versions and give them away for free outside of Origin..then we have a deal...and while you're at it, give us Sim Farm, Sim Ant, Sim City and Sim Copter for free as well...Sim Copter updated to work on Windows 7 and SimCity 2000 with it.

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Especially when you laid out your SC2000 city for SimCopter, strategically placing police/fire/hospitals all over the place (on a grid) to make sure you can rush people back to where they needed to go in no time.

Re: You CAN get SimCity 2000 and Sim Ant, etc for free

No such thing as legal abandoned software unfortunately. Not even a 1990 Disk based C64 game which the company doesn't admit to owning the rights to (Disney Interactive Arachnophobia, though that might just be the marketing division in the dark, but they swore that they never offered a game by that title so...) can be downloaded without a change in the license.

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Or New York City.
If I ever figure out I'm in a disaster movie, I'm getting as far away from NY as possible. It always gets creamed.
For the west coast, it's usually LA... No one ever invades Seattle. Maybe that's a good place to head to.

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You are safest in Ohio...though we do have a problem here as it is the only state in the US that sometimes requires you to use your heater in the morning and air conditioning that same day in the afternoon. And hey...we have The Avengers lurking around pretending Cleveland is New York City...we are totally safe it seems ;-P

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Good alone, even better with mods!

For those of you going back to Sim City 4, I highly reccomend getting the NAM mod. The NAM is a free mod created by a dedicated team of volunteer programmers that cleans up a few of the remaining bugs that were never fixed in offical patches (mainly traffic pathing and logic). Mind you, the traffic pattern and logic in the unmodded SC4 is still WORLDS better than the traffic logic we see in 5imCity proper now.

Can you say Damage Control?

I mean, Mass Effect 3 is a rather decent game campaign-wise.AND it just released its final DLC (which from what I've heard is mostly fanservice junk). On top of that, didn't they just release Dead Space 3 this year?

That said, I'm a console gamer (Xbox 360), not a PC gamer, so I haven't had much trouble with EA's Origin shenanigans (or if I have, I haven't really noticed it yet cause I'm too busy playing Halo 4.)

The big question now is: how many gamers are going to agree to this pathetic attempt at appeasement by EA?

we all know what sort of response this piss taking company should be getting from customers over this further piss taking response. tell then to shove their shit where the sun dont shine and not buy anything else they release. as for the comments from Maxis GM Lucy Bradshaw, she deserves to be sacked immediately! customers are customers and should be treated with respect, not contempt and not like idiotic criminals!

Might as well give away t-shirts

Re: Might as well give away t-shirts

That actually happened to me a few weeks ago. I was in Gamestop, picked up a re-release of all C&C games retooled to work on modern OS's, but wasn't paying attention to what the cashier was putting in the box. When I got home, I opened it up only to find a download code, not a disc.
While it was my own fault for not paying attention...having a physical box with a download code defeats the purpose of buying from Gamestop. When I buy from Gamestop, its because I want the game now, and I want it in physical media. If I'd intended to spend the night downloading, I would've bought them off of Steam.

SimCity 4 was the last EA game I bought.

I got a SimCity 4 from a pirate named Joe. It crashed constantly, but my test drive pleased me. Thinking the pirate were distributing nastyware, I went and bought SimCity 4 + Rush Hour. It crashed constantly. I realized the pirates were perfect, and EA was the nasty.

They appeared content to let the modders fix the problems they knew about, e.g., opera house & traffic routing.

That was it; SimCity 4 is actually the epitome of crapware to me. Haven't paid EA since.

Re: SimCity 4 was the last EA game I bought.

So if you give them a huge amount of money, you not only get a horrible broken piece of shit, but you also get to choose between:
- The previous game in the series, which you can get for like 5€ in the bargain bin, and which every fan (read: the kind of people who would fall for the Sim City Online scam) of the series has anyway
- one of two browsergames
- one of their not even mediocre AAA sequels WITHOUT THE DLC which they hope you to pay the full price of the game for

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LETS RECAP

lies about online being needed. bans people for not reporting bugs (then goes back on it) has major disaster of luanch. changes story about online and gives free gift that they said whould never happen to begin with.

i have been sitting in my chair for the past three minutes trying to think a response to this but the words do not come to me...

Recently, I was thinking of new games that I wanted to get and one of those was Alice: Madness Returns from EA. Then I learned that it has limited activations. The original game is 13 years old now and I still enjoy it. I'm not going to spend any money on a game unless I know for sure that I'll still be able to play it a decade from now (hardware permitting). Is EA still going to be supporting these games in ten years? Considering that they don't have any information about the original game on their site, I sincerely doubt it.